


Made to Measure

by Sharksdontsleep



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Case Fic, Clothing Kink, Family Drama, Family Issues, M/M, References to Drugs, Suits, Tailoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-21 22:32:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17651114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sharksdontsleep/pseuds/Sharksdontsleep
Summary: They find the body at the back of the tailor's shop, undressed. Or underdressed. Striped boxers, white undershirt, one drooping black sock. Pinprick marks up one of his thighs, ending in a livid ring where he’d been bitten.





	Made to Measure

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback, including concrit, appreciated. I can be reached at dontsleepsharks at gmail and tumblr.

They find the body at the back of the tailor's shop, undressed. Or underdressed. Striped boxers, white undershirt, one drooping black sock. Pinprick marks up one of his thighs, ending in a livid ring where he’d been bitten. 

A second body in the back, the shop owner, belts securing his wrists and ankles, a tie wadded into his mouth as a gag. Another bite mark, this one on his back, high up on one shoulder. 

"That's why we called you guys," Womack says. She's new and green at the edges - if Sonny had to guess, it's her first set of bodies, because she's green in that way kids fresh from the police academy are, like she's not done growing into her uniform. "Saw those bites, and with them being undressed and all and -"

She puts her hand up, like she’s not done talking and doesn’t want Sonny to interrupt her. Takes a deep breath, the kind you take when your stomach has crept up to the back of your throat and you're trying to will it back down.

Sonny gestures to a trash can, and hands her her hat back after she's done puking. It's crime scene contamination - the first rule of puking around a body is to do it outside, but that's a lesson she’ll have years to learn if she’s lucky.

Rollins gives them a glance like she's going to say something to her, like Womack can un-hurl, and so Sonny just shakes his head. "C'mon," he says.

He leads her out of the shop, to the food truck outside selling drinks floating in a cooler full of tepid water. He fishes two out and pays before she can get her wallet, then hands one to her. "Tell me about how you found him."

She was walking her beat and saw the shop's broken window; came in and found the bodies, radioed it in immediately. 

"And you were alone?" he asks.

Her partner had gone back to their patrol car for something, and Sonny makes a note to check on the street cameras in the area to confirm that’s where he’d been. Still, it's a decent part of Manhattan, and it's mid-morning. Nothing really worrisome there in leaving a rook alone for a few minutes. 

"I've only been on the job a few weeks," she says. "Can't believe I already caught two bodies."

"Welcome to the NYPD," Sonny says, and then, "Look, we're probably gonna need you to help on the canvas. CSU’s getting the scene secured. It’d be good to go out and see if anyone saw anything.”

She nods and stands up a little straighter. “Sure,” she says. “No problem. I was just wondering, though … It’s strange, right?” She motions to the shop’s broken window. “The glass being outside. If they’d broken in to rob the place, shouldn’t the glass be on the inside?”

“Yeah, Womack, it definitely should,” Sonny says.

 

The first body had been Peter White, a midtown banker with a closet full of bespoke suits, most bearing the label from the shop where he was found. 

“Our guy was loyal, I’ll give him that,” Sonny says. “Financials show his first charge made to that place three years ago, and he hasn’t been bought a suit anywhere else since. And check this out -”

Even through his gloves, the suits feel _expensive_ in that way high-end stuff always does. Heavier without being heavy. Something in the stitching that let you know it was just going to fit right. The little details that said that it wasn’t bought on special at Men’s Warehouse or even off a rack at all. 

“This last one doesn’t even have the stitching in the pockets taken out yet,” he says, pushing his fingers down into one of the jackets. “Guy has a new enough suit that he hasn’t worn it yet, and he goes back for another.”

“Jealous, Carisi?” Rollins asks. 

“Damn right I’m jealous,” he says. “Think we should take these in as evidence? Seems wrong for them to just sit in a storage locker for the rest of eternity.”

“You know the drill,” Rollins says, and then gestures for a CSU guy to start bagging them up. 

“So our perp must have known where to find him,” Benson says, when they’re back at the station. “High end shop like that probably has a log where they keep appointments. See if our vic kept a regular schedule, as well is if there were any other regular customers. Maybe our perp is also a customer.”

The appointment book is handwritten in an almost inscrutable scrawl, and it takes Sonny longer than it should to figure out most of the names. “What do you think that says?” He shoves the book across the desk at Fin, who shrugs. 

“Mitchell? Michael?” Sonny asks. “Why can’t these guys embrace the 21st century and just use Google calendar like everyone else?” 

“Old school shop,” Fin says. “Guess that’s part of the charm or something.” 

It takes almost an hour to get the first page of the book transcribed. A low throb blooms at Sonny’s temple that not even another cup of coffee can dispell. Most of the shop’s customers have generic rich guy names, and the shop bills all seemed to be on old-fashioned tickets. It was going to be hunting a needle in a haystack to even make sure they were talking to the right guys. 

Which is why he almost doesn’t notice when he turns the page. “Well,” he says. “Here’s one customer we know we’ll be able to find.” 

Rollins raises her eyebrows in question. 

He taps his finger by the appointment. Thursday, two weeks ago, the same day as when the vic had come in for a fitting. The name listed by it: Rafael Barba. 

 

“I assume you’re here because my tailor got murdered,” Barba says, when Sonny shows up at his office the next day, coffee cups perched in a cardboard carrier, a bag of pastries hanging from his wrist.

“If you knew that already, you could have saved me the walk,” Sonny says.

“And deprive Carmen?” Barba reaches into the pastry bag, extracting one of the little custard tarts. “These don’t seem like the usual.”

“There’s a Portuguese place that opened up near my building,” Sonny says. “Figured I should expand my horizons or something.”

Barba eats his pastry, gesturing for Sonny to sit at the interview table. “So my tailor got murdered. A customer too, from what Liv said. Any idea why?”

“Looking into that, but really, you were the first customer who we could contact. Figured I’d talk to you about, you know, what the business was like. The process of it, how frequently customers needed to return. Get some sense of the pattern so I could look for anything unusual.” 

“So, I’m acting as an expert witness?” Barba asks. He looks amused. 

“Pretty much,” Sonny says, taking out his notepad and a pen. “I always did want to know what goes into one of those suits of yours, I guess.”

Sonny’s used to hearing Barba talk - that’s what lawyers do. They talk, and spin stories from evidence, arguments from stories. Barba spends most of his time on his feet, orating for an audience, with the passion and command that that entails. 

Still, it’s something else to hear him apply all of that _Barba_ to talking about what he wears. The guy can dress, no doubt - Sonny has had more than one person who didn’t know Barba’s name describe him as, “you know, the guy with the clothes.” 

“A suit is really the product of a relationship,” he begins. “It starts like a first date - you go, you meet your tailor. Discuss your style and interests; where you’ll be wearing it - if you’ll be on camera, if you need to travel with it, what season you want to wear it during.”

“How’d you find that particular tailor?” Sonny cuts in. 

Barba considers the question. “A friend recommended him. Said he was a good fit for the kind of suits I wore. Knew that I’m … particular about certain aspects of construction.” 

“And let’s say if you didn’t have a friend who already went there?”

“How does anyone find anything, Carisi?” Barba says. “Probably through either word of mouth or Yelp.”

Carisi jots down a note to look at the shop’s Yelp reviews, in case this is some kind of customer with a grudge. “So, you make an appointment -”

“Well, he actually vetted me first,” Barba says. “Asked to see a few pictures of my wearing clothes I particularly liked. There was some back and forth.”

“Via email?” 

Barba doesn’t answer, and instead pulls out his phone, not the familiar Blackberry Carisi has seen him wield during interrogations, but an iPhone that looks to be a few models old. He taps at it for a second and then brings up an email thread, which he hands to Sonny. “Here.”

Sonny scrolls through their correspondence, finally giving a low whistle as he comes to the last email. “I’ve been asked fewer questions at a job interview.” 

“Well, that does explain your peripatetic existence before SVU.” 

“So, you go, you submit your application, your references, and your mom’s blood type or whatever, and then you go in for the first fitting?” 

“More or less.”

“Did you go in knowing what you want?” 

Barba, for some reason, finds that funny enough to give one of those little half-smiles he does when Sonny has said something that he either agrees with or thinks is very stupid. “Do you go in to a first date knowing what you want?” he asks.

“More or less,” Sonny says. 

“Well, that’s something to unpack at a later time, Detective.” Sonny hands him back his phone, which he tucks away into an interior jacket pocket. 

“So, it’s a relationship,” Sonny, prompts. 

“Yes. It’s the same as if you went to the same barber for years. Or in your case, the same bakery run by an Italian nonna who knows all of your business. They get to know you; you get to know them. It should be a relationship, and the resulting clothes are a product of that relationship.”

“Like children?” Sonny asks.

“I was thinking more like art.” Barba gives an exaggerated shrug. “Or like children, if that works better you.” 

“How long does that collaboration usually take for a new suit? Let’s say if it’s with a tailor who already knew what you liked and everything.”

“All my many preferences? At least four or five weeks, depending on if I wanted something out of the ordinary.”

“And you’d need to do how many fittings for that?”

“Two, usually,” Barba says. “Though they’re not necessarily spaced evenly during that time. Once to get the drape of the suit, and the next to work out the finer details. Many tailors work with a specific cutter, if they’re not doing that themselves. Might be worth looking into; I don’t know if he had work sent out - I always assumed so, but didn’t ask.”

“So,” Sonny says. “There’d be no reason for a customer to visit the shop at the same time every week for an appointment? Especially if his financials showed he only bought two or three suits in a six month period?”

“Not unless he had some very particular needs. Or was there for something other than to get his pants fitted.” 

“That what I was thinking as well, Counselor.” 

 

Sonny goes through the vic’s suits, one by one by one by one, unsheathing each from its CSU bag before patting it down for hidden pockets, for things sewn into the lining, like a stash car he thinks might have a kilo stuffed in one of the wheel wells. 

Except he doesn’t find anything, just a set of very fine suits made for a body lying on a slab in the ME’s office, now crudely stitched back together from its autopsy. The tox screen had come back positive for just about everything he expected to find in a midtown banker - pot, cocaine, Ambien, even alcohol - but that made sense when the vic had gotten bloody marys not two hours before he was murdered, according to his credit card receipts and the waitress at a nearby brunch place.

He pats each suit down carefully, then hands them to a CSU tech to swab them for trace evidence, though chances are they’ll just come back positive for what’s in the vic’s system. 

“God,” says Ramirez, the tech who’s meticulously tracing Q-tips along each seam and pocket and then cataloging which suit they came from. “Can you even imagine wearing this shit every day? It’d make me afraid to drink a coffee, you know?”

Sonny has seen Ramirez step over blood and brain matter to pick almost-microscopic fibers out of a hole in the wall made by a victim’s head, heedless of what got on his shoes as long as it didn’t compromise the scene. “Didn’t know you cared that much.”

“I mean, if I dropped what this guy probably dropped on each of these, I’d have them scotch-guarded more than my grandma’s couch.” 

“I think Barba would kill me if I did that,” Sonny says, and Ramirez just hums an agreement as he extracts a tuft of Q-tip and then adds a few drops of what look like a chemical indicator in a microplate well. 

“You said this guy had cocaine in his system?” he asks. “Because he also had it in his pockets. Or at least, some cocaine. Maybe something else as well.” 

He repeats the process with further bits of Q-tip and other color indicators. “Some heroin too, I think. Need to confirm with chromatography, but looks like our boy had some fun party drugs in -” He pauses. “What kind of user keeps their drugs in their back pockets? And in their suit jacket pockets?”

“Wait,” Sonny says. “You’re saying he had drugs in his back pockets but not his front pockets?” 

“Yep.”

“Great - just,” and he pauses to get out his phone, “Uh, keep swabbing, and let me know what you find.”

Sonny calls Barba on his office number. It rings, twice, and then Barba picks up with a sigh. “What is it, Detective?” 

“When you wear a suit for the first time, what’s the first thing you do?”

“Carisi, I’m in the middle of -” Barba stops himself. “I cut the stitching out of the pockets.” 

“And what’s usually in there?”

“Nothing,” Barba says. “It’s a new suit.” 

“So your tailor never put in anything extra? Hidden change pocket? Baggie of cocaine that you would push to all your Wall Street friends?”

“Is that why -”

“Those marks, the ones that the officer who called it in - she thought they were bite marks. But here’s the thing about bite marks. It’s pretty hard to get ‘em that circular. And we didn’t find any DNA on ‘em not belonging to the vics.” Sonny takes a breath, rocking back on his heels. His shoes are new, stiff enough that the leather creaks a little.

“My guess is that they were made by some kind of cutter or tool - I don’t, something like a pizza cutter but for fabric that the perp used to make us think it was some kind of sex thing,” he says. 

“But this was just a good ol’ fashioned American drug murder,” Barba says. 

“Looks like.” 

“Well, I’m sure the detectives over at Homicide will be glad that you’re clearing two cases for them.”

“See that’s the thing,” Sonny says. “I don’t think the perp was trying to make this look like a sex crime just for kicks.”

“No?” Barba asks, but his tone is curiosity edged in something else.

“No,” Sonny says. “I think they were trying to get to someone. Maybe a well-known customer who also liked to splash his fancy suits on the evening news. Someone with a connection to SVU.”

Barba doesn’t respond for a second, and Sonny can actually feel him thinking through the phone. “This is going to mean another protection detail, isn’t?”

“It must be hard being so popular, Counselor.”

 

They don’t ask Sonny if he’s willing to be on Barba’s protection detail. He’s just assigned to a handful of shifts, mostly in the afternoon or evening. “Let me know if that’s a problem,” Benson says. It’s not, really; he can just go to noon mass instead. 

Two days later, he shows up for his assigned shift, toting a box of case files and a bag of amaretti cookies as a prophylactic against Barba’s inevitable bad mood. Instead, he finds Barba in his office, chipper as when he’s had a good day in court, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. 

“I guess you drew the short straw,” he says. “Getting the evening shift, and all.”

“Planning to work late?” Sonny asks, but he knows what Barba looks like when he’s settled in for a long night. Barba flips through case files and making notes himself, occasionally muttering and then glaring at Sonny when he does the same, while Sonny catches up on the paperwork he always vows to do in a timely fashion but then puts off to the end of the month.

Two hours into it, and Barba makes noises about ordering food, pours two healthy doses of scotch into a set of heavy glass tumblers.

“You know I can’t drink that while I’m working,” Sonny says. 

“Who says both aren’t for me?” Barba asks, sipping from one. He’s close enough, and the office warm enough, that Sonny can smell it - alcohol, sure, but something else vegetal without being grassy. What he’d always thought a peat bog might smell like, though he’s been to the Pine Barrens, and those just smell like wet Jersey woods. It’s a smell he associates with Barba, like aftershave and smugness, and one that makes him think about the afternoons they spent working back when Sonny was shadowing him.

Barba must think of those too, because he interrupts the silence. “You know, if you’d become an ADA, you wouldn’t get stuck with nightime babysitting duty.” 

“If I was a lawyer, I’d be here working late anyway.” 

“Touche. Though don’t pretend that if you weren’t here, you wouldn’t just be at SVU doing the same paperwork in worse lighting and without the comfort of my couch.”

“It is a nice couch,” Sonny says. He wiggles enough to make the upholstery squeak and earn himself an exaggerated glare from Barba. “Did you do some thinking about who might have it out for you?” 

“Yes, Carisi, I made a list, and it was long enough that I figured it’d be easier just to make a list of people who probably _aren’t_ out to get me. It includes, in no particular order, Rita Calhoun, Olivia Benson, and my mother.”

“And me,” Sonny says.

“And you. Unless this is an elaborate ruse.”

“I would be the last person you’d suspect.” Sonny considers he form he had been in the midst of filling out, before closing the file and shutting his laptop. “We could order food. Or you could concede that you’re done working and I’ll make sure you get home alright.”

Barba makes a point of flagging something in the casefile he’s been reading (and rereading without turning a page) for at least ten minutes. “My neighbors are …” he begins. 

And Sonny expects him to complain about what most people complain about - loud neighbors, thin walls, the usual apartment nonsense. He used to live under someone who might have been a professional clog dancer; it was hard to get any work done.

“My neighbors are out of town,” Barba says. “They’re usually -” he pauses to belt down the rest of his scotch - “it’s too quiet in my apartment. The last two nights - it’s been fine until it gets to be late enough that I’m going to sleep, and then …” 

He doesn’t finish, but Carisi can fill in the blanks. And then his apartment’s too quiet, even with the noise from the street, the building’s heat kicking on. The creeping shadows, familiar objects becoming sinister in the half-dark. The fear that, if someone was lurking there, you wouldn’t be able to call for help in time. That you’d die with a scream stuck in your throat.

It also occurs to him how much it must have taken Barba to admit that - Barba, who’d neglected to tell them about death threats for _weeks_. Barba who does stupid shit like give his address to people who wanted him dead just to prove that he wasn’t afraid. 

Barba, who’s all but admitting to jumping at shadows. It makes Sonny feel something, some stitched together mix of horror at someone as confident as Barba being afraid and a second guiltier feeling - pride that Barba is revealing this to him; pride that he’s needed.

“You ever made pasta?” he asks, and Barba’s accompanying look of confusion is worth it. “Seems like a good night for it, is what I’m saying. You got flour, eggs, and oil, right?”

Which is how he ends up at Barba’s kitchen counter, sleeves rolled up, kneading out dough as Barba watches him. “Here,” he says, once the dough has sufficiently come together and has had time to chill. He hands Barba the rolling pin that looked like it’d never so much seen a speck of flour before. 

“Is there any trick to this?” Barba asks.

“Try to get it even, more or less,” Sonny says. He doesn’t say not to beat the hell out of it - whatever stress Barba wants to put into kneading or rolling out dough will mean that it’s no longer in his shoulders, across the line of his back, tensing his well-cut shirt. “Also, you probably want to change, unless you want that shirt to be covered in flour.” 

“Didn’t seem to stop you,” Barba says, gesturing to where Sonny has flour on his forearms, a light sprinkling on the front of his shirt where it’d come into contact with the counter.

“Well, I don’t think of my clothes as artwork.” 

“We all have our faults, Detective,” Barba says, but he goes to change. 

Barba’s pasta comes out uneven, lumpy, thin enough in parts that it snaps when Sonny goes to put it into boiling water. It also seems to calm him in a way that the glass of wine he’s drinking doesn’t. Barba, barefoot in his own kitchen, pants dusted with flour and hair resisting its product in the humidity from the boiling pasta, looks wholly different from Barba, master of the cross-examination, or Barba, at the window of an interrogation room, shaking his head at a perp not realizing they’d just confessed. 

He’s still wearing his suit pants, but has on a casual-looking sweater the same color as his wine that, despite being what he’d wear to cook in, seems like it was made for him. At ease in a way that Sonny has rarely seen him. Comfortable in his mid-sized apartment with a surprising number of plants. They’re mostly succulents, including a massive aloe plant by one window, and a cactus that looks soft enough to pet. Sonny does, trailing a finger over one of its spikes, and definitely not thinking that it’s like Barba himself, spiky, deep-rooted, and hopefully as difficult to kill. 

Sonny’s not technically on duty anymore, hasn’t been since Braba closed his door, with its three locks, fastened the chain that would do little against an intruder intent on kicking the door in. 

He’s not drinking, though he feels a little flushed from the heat of the kitchen, whatever music Barba has playing in the background. At ease enough to admit that he’s not looking for tension in the lines of Barba’s back, in the seams of his clothing, in a purely professional context. 

“Where do you live, Carisi?” Barba asks, when they’re done eating. “Surely, you can’t be commuting back and forth from Staten Island every day.”

“No,” Sunny says. And then, “Red Hook. Makes the drive back home easier.” 

Barba hums, goes to clear his and Sonny’s plate, soaping and rinsing each before depositing them in the dishrack. “I have a guest room.”

It’s not quite an offer, though Sonny hears it for what it is. It’s late enough that it’ll take him at least 45 minutes to get home. A tempting offer, if his clothes weren’t so clearly worn and he hasn’t bothered keeping anything beyond an extra set of gym clothes and underwear at the station for a while. 

He tells Barba so, and Barba simply leads him up the hall to a washer and dryer, a box of dry cleaner sheets set nearby. It’s feels like a ridiculous luxury, even for Barba, when Sonny’s sure his building probably has a serviceable laundry room. 

“You don’t have everything sent out?” Sonny asks, gesturing to the box of dry cleaner sheets sitting on top of the washer. 

Barba puts a finger to his lips, like it’s a secret, like standing in the hallway of Barba’s apartment discussing how Sonny’s going to go into work tomorrow in today’s clothes, doesn’t itself feel like a enough of a secret. 

He tries to imagine doing this with Rollins, with Benson, but can only imagine an entirely different conversation, one that begins with Jessie or Noah puking on him and ends with him spending a night asleep on their couch, then eating Cheerios in the morning and talking about Paw Patrol. 

Barba doesn’t ask again if he wants to stay - hadn’t really asked in the first place. It occurs to Sonny that he should think of Barba as ‘Rafael’ when he’s standing there, shifting weight between his feet, waiting for Sonny to agree to sleep one wall away from him.

He doesn’t ask, but he opens his mouth, he might say, “please,” and Sonny doesn’t want to hear what Barba sounds like, or if he has a shake in his voice.

“I’m gonna smell like you tomorrow,” Sonny says, nodding to the dryer sheets.

“I’m sure it’ll suit you, Carisi,” Barba says, before turning away to grab Sonny a set of towels from the linen closet. 

 

He doesn’t smell like himself the next day - between Barba’s sheets and laundry, the shampoo that seemed to strip Sonny’s hair of a month’s worth of product build-up - and it should be moderately insulting how many people comment on it. 

“New cologne?” Rollins asks, giving Sonny a sniff, and Sonny just shakes his head. He doesn’t mention his sleepover at Barba’s - that feels like a betrayal of trust, even if Barba didn’t ask him not to mention it, just fed Sonny an espresso so sweet that it might be half sugar and ushered him out the door in a freshly ironed shirt.

Rollins doesn’t mention that he’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday; whether she doesn’t notice or is choosing not to mention it is anyone’s guess. She’s caught a new case, and she and Benson drive off to investigate a local holistic healing center that might be a front for a celebrity sex cult. 

He’s still working the tailor shop murders, mostly because Homicide initially wanted the clearances but then turned him down when it became clear that he didn’t have a short-list of suspects. 

Despite Barba’s protestations that the list of people who hated him was too long to count, he’d provided Sonny a list of a few defendants with particular grudges, and Sonny checks to see if they match up to the shop’s suppliers, clients, or financial records. It’s slow work, and there’s no guarantee that the perp, whoever they are, used their real name. 

TARU had scanned in and digitized some of the records, but the OCR isn’t perfect, and Sonny spends as much time fixing their digitizing efforts as he does looking for potential perps. It’s not exactly the kind of work he’d envisioned when he first applied to be a detective - the kind of dull task that nevertheless required his full concentration. 

“Maybe you should come at it the opposite way,” Fin says, when Sonny complains to him. “Get Barba to look through the financials to see if there are any names that look familiar. Could be relatives or witnesses that’re mad at him, not just perps.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“It’s what I’d do,” Fin says. “So of course it’s a good idea, Carisi.”

He puts away the files for now, just in time to have Rollins and Benson come back, a potential perp in tow, a smarmy-looking guy who claims that all the women forbidden to leave his bizarro sex dungeon are drugging their own food too. 

“We figured you might want a go at him,” Benson says. “You know, man to man.” 

Sonny sighs, and tries to figure some way to phrase, ‘who among us hasn’t run a sex cult out of a crystal healing studio?’ in a way that doesn’t sound sarcastic. 

Two hours and a confession later, he heads over to Barba’s office for his scheduled shift, feeling like he wants to either puke or take the world’s longest shower. His suit, which had felt more or less fresh that morning, doesn’t fit right, the arms on his jacket too tight, his shirt refusing to stay neatly tucked into his pants. 

Barba mentions his looking, if not disheveled, then less pulled together than he’d like, when he comes in. “Someone might think you didn’t make it home last night, Detective,” he says, taking one of the coffees Sonny had brung. 

“I also brought work,” Sonny says, taking the casefile out of his bag. “Just in case you thought this was a social call.”

Barba looks through the financial records first, tracing down the list of customers and shaking his head at each one. “Without any other context, these could be anyone,” he says, tapping a specific entry. “Do you know how many Jorge Garzas there probably are in Manhattan? And how many defendants, witnesses, perps, random passersby, whoever, named ‘Garza’ I’ve dealt with over the years?” 

“I hear you, Counselor,” Sonny says, because he’s been thinking the same thing too, but hadn’t wanted to say it. “We just - if there’s any leads that I’m not thinking of, any ways to come at this … we’ve recanvased the area around the scene just to see if anyone didn’t remember something the first time. Checked security cameras and license plate readers. I even ran the street footage through facial recognition just to see if we got anyone. Turns out either half of Manhattan is felons or that software is buggy.”

Barba laughs, but it isn’t his laugh when he actually finds something funny. “So I just, what? Keep on looking at lists of names that might as well be the phone book and hope no one comes through my window at night to kill me?”

“You live on the 18th floor,” Sonny says. “Unless you pissed off Spider-Man, I think we can probably rule that out. Besides, Peter Parker isn’t even listed here.” He taps his finger against the list of entries. 

“Wait,” Barba says, looking at an entry. “How many times did John Castle come in for fittings?”

Sonny does a control+F and searches for ‘Castle,’ then pages through the hard-copy records. “Looks like he was only there once.” 

“OK,” Barba says. “Flag that one.”

Sonny highlights it. “You remember something?”

Barba rubs his temples, and then says, “Yes, but I’ll need to …” He sits down, begins tapping at his computer, then gets up and begins digging through his files. “You can go, Carisi,” he says, waving a hand toward the door.

“Not according to our mutually agreed upon schedule, I can’t,” he says. “And besides, we finally find a possible lead and you’re kicking me out? Nuh-uh, Counselor. We’re not doing that.”

“Fine,” Barba says. “But I’m going to need to go uptown.”

“Let’s go,” Sonny says, standing up. “But I’m driving.”

“A hard bargain,” Barba says. “Particularly since I never learned.” He pulls on his coat and loops a scarf around his neck. “Just promise me something, Carisi. This might be a wild goose chase or it might … not. And if it’s not, I’d like to be the one to let Liv know that it isn’t.”

“It’s a promise,” Sonny says.

“In that case, lead the way.”

Going ‘uptown’ turns out to be the Bronx. “I thought you just meant ‘above Midtown,’” he says. 

“This is - this is near where I grew up. I imagine it’s not quite as pastoral as your native environs.”

Sonny looks around at the blocks of apartment buildings, the fire escapes snaking up the sides of buildings, a few scraggly plants pushing up the sidewalk concrete. “Yeah,” he says. “Probably not.”

“I need to see an aunt of mine. Well, a cousin, but she’s older. How much Spanish do you understand?”

“I mean, I know some from when I was walking a beat and I try to do some DuoLingo … I get by, more or less.”

Barba says something in rapid Spanish, and it doesn’t sound like Spanish he’s heard him use before with witnesses. “Didn’t think so,” he says. “My aunt didn’t come over until much later than the rest of the family. Most of this will probably be in Spanish, just as a fair warning.” 

Sonny nods. “I can be a fly on the wall,” he says, drawing a snort from Barba. “But I’m not leaving you alone, in case -”

“I’m not asking you to, Detective,” Barba says, holding up a hand. “Let’s see if she’ll even see me.”

Barba’s aunt lives on the sixth floor, and by the time they make it up there, Barba’s stripped his coat off and is breathing a little more purposefully. He looks apprehensive, even more so when he knocks and there’s the sound of someone coming to the door, the covering being removed from the peephole. There’s a beat, and then another, and Barba inhales like he’s about to say something before there’s a rattle from the chain being unlatched, the locks being opened.

His aunt, who introduces herself to Sonny as Estefania, encourages them to sit. Her apartment could be one of Sonny’s aunt’s apartments, down to the picture of the Virgin robed in blue hanging on one wall, the TV turned to soap operas, the couch safe under its plastic cover. Only the signed picture of Mariano Rivera in his Yankee pinstripes would look out of place on Staten Island. 

She goes into the kitchen, and Sonny can hear her rattling at the stove after Barba agrees that they both would love a coffee. “You were surprised she opened the door,” Sonny whispers to Barba. “Why?” 

But Barba doesn’t have time to answer, before Estefania emerges holding a plate with a few sugar cookies on it. “Gracias, Tía,” Barba says, before taking one. 

What follows is a conversation, as Barba promised, mostly in Spanish. Sonny can catch a word here and there, and at one point, she looks at him and asks, in deliberately slow Spanish, if he understands what she’s saying.

He shakes his head, and then clarifies that it’s demasiado rápido for him. A minute later, she gets up, and Sonny can hear her going through her kitchen cabinets. “She’s not going to put rat poison in my café con leche, right, Counselor?”

“If she does,” Barba says, “it’s what I deserve. Or what she feels I deserve.” 

She comes back, not just with coffees, but with a photo album, which she hands to Barba. He holds it for a minute, closed in both hands, before flipping it open. 

Sonny can see a set of baby pictures, family pictures from what look like a baptism. Estefania, years ago, when her hair was more brown than gray. In one, Barba as an awkward-looking child, and it had been impossible for Sonny to imagine him wearing a clip-on tie before seeing that photo. Under other circumstances, he’d make a joke.

“Tía …” Barba begins, and his voice sounds hoarse. 

“Does your friend know what you did to my baby?” she asks, in English. “No, of course.” She says something else in Spanish, something that makes Barba wince. 

She’s not angry, though, or is, but the resigned sort of anger that draws tears instead of yelling. Barba offers her a handkerchief, and she looks at it for a second before accepting it. 

That she’s crying doesn’t surprise Sonny; that Barba’s eyes look wet does, and Sonny makes a move to give them some privacy - there should be a bathroom up the hall he could hide in for a minute - before Barba puts a hand on Sonny’s knee, gripping hard enough that Sonny doesn’t get up. 

There’s a few minutes of that, Estefania crying and Barba breathing wetly, before Barba rises, says, once, “Lo siento,” and again, “I’m truly sorry, Tía,” before walking toward the door, Sonny trailing behind him. 

Out in the hallway, the door shut behind them, the locks already thrown, and Barba is looking at the six flights of narrow stairs like they might as well be the edge of a cliff. “Do you want to -” Sonny begins, and Barba looks at him, open, the way he had the night before, standing in the hallway, wordlessly begging Sonny not to leave but too proud to ask him to stay.

“Hey, come here,” Sonny says, and up close, Barba smells like his dryer sheets, like hair product, like the coffee they’d just drunk. He feels expensive, the smooth fabric of his suit under Sonny’s hands, and he gives several deep inhales into the crook of Sonny’s neck, gripping Sonny’s shirt tightly enough that the stitches probably pull.

“He’s dead,” Barba says, a long minute later. “Her son - or one of them. The younger one.” 

“And she blames you,” Sonny says. It’s not a question.

“Yes,” Barba says. “Deservedly.” He begins walking toward the stairs. “I’ll explain, I just -”

“Take your time,” Sonny says. 

Barba doesn’t speak as they walk downstairs, or out in Sonny’s car. Sonny should drive back to Hogan Plaza or back to the station, but instead turns, plotting a route in his GPS to Queens. 

“Where are we going?” 

“Uh,” Sonny says. “The Botanical Gardens. I sometimes - if I have something on my mind, I go there sometimes.”

“You are full of surprises,” Barba says, but he sounds more like himself.

It’s well enough into fall that the trees at the Gardens have dropped their leaves; not far enough toward winter for anything like snow. Most of the shrubs and grass are browning at the edges, the oaks reaching toward the sky with bare branches. A few flowers are out, late fall colors, oranges and yellows that stand as bright as pocket squares against the otherwise muted background. 

Distantly, Sonny can hear what sounds like a school group learning about how plants make sugar from the air. A few giggle at the idea of sweetness coming from something unseen, before their teacher begins talking about the parts of a leaf, voices fading as they move to another part of the Gardens.

Barba walks next to him, close enough that their shoulders brush. “Her son,” he says. “I was an ADA in Brooklyn. He got brought in on a drug charge - cocaine and heroin. Enough that they were going to charge him with distribution, though he swore it was just for personal use. I worked with a Bronx ADA. Got the charges reduced. Got him out in a few months and - She was grateful, until she wasn’t. Until her son came home to her, more addicted than when he left. He drifted, out of her life unless it was to ask for something and, eventually, take it from her.” 

Barba pauses, goes to one of the benches and sits. “I hadn’t thought about him really - in years, if I’m honest. He died, last year. I think I had Carmen send flowers to the funeral.”

“Most people, they’d be grateful he didn’t get sent upstate,” Sonny says. “You did what you could. I mean -”

“I’m not looking for reassurance I did the right thing, _Detective_ ” Barba snaps. “I know I didn’t. That there isn’t a right thing, and if there were, I didn’t do it. I abdicated my responsibility. I treated him like … Like an annoyance. Like he should have just gone and gotten himself clean. Like I was doing special favors for a stranger and not like he was family.” 

Sonny doesn’t say anything more for a minute, the need to reassure Barba welling up inside of him, words pressing against the backs of his teeth, the need to _do_ something about this making his palms ache, curling his hands into fists. Considers the pieces before him - Barba, confessing to his past wrongs; two bodies still lying cold in the morgue - and how to fix them, to repair what’s broken. A voice in his head that sounds suspiciously like Theresa’s: What’s the use of being there if he doesn’t even try to help?

“That’s kind of bullshit,” Sonny says, finally. “Blaming you for him being an addict -”

“You’d rather she blame herself?” Barba’s mad now, up and pacing, and it’s almost reassuring. Something familiar, the rapid-fire responses, the particular sneer he has for Sonny.

“She could …” Sonny says, but then the blame is on her son, on whatever circumstances that conspired to put heroin in his veins, on the South Bronx, on the series of events and environments and decisions that makes addicts who they are. 

He puts a hand up before Barba can get up, can tell Sonny to go fuck himself or whatever the Harvard graduate version of that is. Probably ‘go fuck yourself.” Before he can summon an Uber to take him back to Hogan Plaza, even if Sonny is technically acting as a bodyguard now. 

“Sorry,” he says, and Barba deflates like Sonny’d pricked him with a pin. “You’re right, you’re right. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No,” Barba says, “you shouldn’t have.” But he sits down again, closer than he had before, thigh nearly touching Sonny’s, then resting against his when Sonny widens his legs slightly, Barba’s slacks catching on the rougher fabric of Sonny’s pants. 

“Do you know what she said to me?” Barba asks, after a minute. “That I was ashamed of where I came from. That I didn’t want to get barrio mud on my nice suit.”

“Rafael, I -” 

“That one stung,” he says. “Tía Estefi would have made a great prosecutor. Always knows how to dig the knife in at just the right spot.”

Sonny doesn’t know what to say, or if there is anything to say to that. Barba isn’t looking for forgiveness, and Sonny couldn’t give it, anyway. Knows the deep guilt of your own past bad decisions, the kind that only goes away through heavy drinking or prayer. He wonders if Barba will light a candle for his cousin, if he still finds meaning in that, or if he ever did. 

Barba shrugs his camel-colored coat closer around him, fiddles with the end of his scarf. His hands are going slightly red from the cold, and he doesn’t move to put on gloves. Sonny’s hands itch to take one of them in his own, to offer even that small amount of comfort.

Instead, he sits, leg against Barba’s, warmth caught between them, watching the wind move the branches of the trees, a few late-autumn geese making their way across the grass. Eventually, Barba rises and begins walking back toward where they parked, and, after a second, Sonny follows him. 

When they get in the car, Barba leans his head against the cold window and closes his eyes. He looks tired in the fading daylight, the lines on his forehead and beside his eyes that normally make him look distinguished not fully relaxed. 

“There’s someone else I should be talking to, other than your aunt, right?” Sonny asks. He phrases it as a question, but it’s one he pretty much knows the answer to. Little old ladies sitting in their apartments in the South Bronx don’t murder two fully grown men and then cut at their corpses.

“Her last name is Castillo. John Castle - that’s her son. The older one. Juan Castillo. From the appointment log,” Barba says, not quite opening his eyes. “That’s how I knew. I knew it couldn’t be a coincidence, not after you found drugs in the vic’s pockets. Maybe my cousin got them there. Maybe his brother traced the supplier and wanted to make a point. Or maybe it was just a way of showing me what was going on, right under my nose. Revenge against me for letting him die and I didn’t have - there was no one else they thought I cared about.” 

“See,” Sonny says, and he considers putting his hand on Barba’s knee, on his shoulder, before reaching over and grasping Barba’s hand in his. “That’s where he got you all wrong.”

“Did he?” Barba says, looking down at their hands.

“You tell me, Counselor,” Sonny says, and and he rubs a thumb across Barba’s knuckles before releasing his grip.

“I think,” Barba says, “that if someone cared for me enough to protect me, to offer me solace when I needed it, I would work to … I would try to be worth that. To be worthy of that.”

Sonny leans in then, not to kiss him, though he has the urge to, to rest his mouth against Barba’s neck, to take him back to his apartment, peel his suit from him. To show him how much he’s valued, wanted. 

He doesn’t, though, just leans his shoulder against Barba’s over the center console in the car, nudging slightly, letting Barba rest on him. There’s more to talk about: How to find Barba’s cousin, where he might go to hide evidence. Or if he’s smart like Barba, if there’ll be anything they can pin at all. But for now, he sits with his shoulder against Barba’s, watching as the afternoon turns into evening. As the the Christmas lights someone’s draped over the trees that hadn’t been visible before begin to blink on. 

 

The next day, and Barba comes into the squadroom looking like a man on a mission. He goes directly into Benson’s office and shuts the door behind him. 

“You know what that’s about,” Fin says, nodding toward the shut door. It’s not a question.

Sonny doesn’t bother to deny it, just offers to get Fin a coffee from the gurgling machine in the breakroom that dispenses something that doesn’t taste sweet enough, even when he dumps two sugar packets into it.

He’ll need to go pick up Juan Castillo at some point; there’s not enough for a warrant, but Castillo’s a real estate broker without an priors. He’ll either come quietly to the station to answer questions, or he’s already fled the country.

Sonny holds off on checking with any of the airports, mostly because he doesn’t want to answer why he’s flagging that particular passport until Barba’s had a chance to talk. If Castillo’s smart, he’ll take a bus to Canada, cross at the border, hop the first plane to Cuba and pray that no one from NYPD ever files a warrant for him. 

He hadn’t said as much to Barba, but he knows Barba’s thinking it. Had been on their drive into the city from Queens the day before, feeling very distant on the other side of the car, staring at the Manhattan lights as they came into view. 

Some part of Sonny, maybe the part that’s not fully awake from where his morning coffee hadn’t kicked in, thinks about their hands together, Barba’s palm not as soft than he’d expected for a lawyer, the slightly squared-off calluses at the ends of his fingers. The way that he’d said, “Thank you,” before getting out of Sonny’s car, again when Sonny rode the elevator up to his apartment with him and waited for Barba to lock up before leaving, a ‘thank you’ emanating from behind the closed door. 

Benson opens her office, and Sonny is up before Barba even has a chance to step out. “We’ll go pick him up,” he says, meeting Barba at the door frame.

“Carisi,” Benson says. “A word.”

Sonny steps aside to let Barba pass. He’s in pinstripes today, a sharp-looking suit, and a sharper look thrown back toward Benson’s office, though Sonny doesn’t have time to check to see if it’s directed at him or at Benson or just at the world in general.

Inside, and Benson looks unreadable. Or, not unreadable, but like she normally does with victims, suspects, witnesses, and family members. Calm, the kind of calm that conceals a deep well of anger, or of compassion, and Sonny’s not sure which he’s going to get. 

“Barba says he took you to visit his cousin yesterday,” she says. 

“It was my shift on his detail,” Sonny says, and winces. He already sounds defensive. 

Benson doesn’t say anything else, just lets the silence hang for a minute. As an interrogation tactic, it’s incredibly effective, and even when Sonny knows it’s a tactic, he struggles not to immediately fill the quiet. 

“How much of the conversation did you hear?” she asks, finally. 

“Hear?” Sonny says. “All of it. But it was mostly in Spanish, so I probably caught one word out of twenty.” 

“Barba thinks that his cousin has already probably fled back to Cuba.”

“It’d be the smart money thing to do. Get out before the bodies are cold.”

“We checked with the airports and CBP at the Canadian border, and he hasn’t gotten on a flight or tried to cross.” Benson says. “Barba never told you why his family emigrated, did he?”

Sonny shakes his head.

“His cousin may have left the country under a false identity. It may be worth checking with whatever forgers we know about. See how many could make a workable Cuban passport.” 

“I’ll do my best, Lieu,” Sonny says, but he knows a hail mary pass when he hears one. 

“I’m expecting to be kept in the loop on this, Carisi,” she says. “Especially if … it turns out Castillo had accomplices helping him fake his identity. Accomplices with resources, maybe who knew how to ask the right questions about extradition laws.”

It takes a minute to sink in. “Lieutenant, you’re not suggesting that Barba may have _helped_ the cousin who probably murdered two people flee the country?” 

“I’m not saying anything like that, Carisi. I’m saying that Barba has a mother who he loves very much, a family that, while as not as large or demanding as some,” and she gives him a significant look, “might reach out to him at various points for favors that he might not question at the time. Small loans, free legal advice. The types of things Barba would do without much second thought.”

“The kind of thing that, in retrospect, might implicate more than just his cousin,” Sonny continues. “And the kind of thing that he’d probably be reluctant to disclose if it meant his aunt might do time for it.” 

“Keep your eyes open, Carisi,” Benson says. “That’s all I’m asking.” 

“Yeah, somebody’s gotta remain objective about this case, I guess,” Sonny says, and Benson gives him a long look like she can see not just under his clothes, but under his skin, to the beat of his nervous heart, before telling him to leave the door open on his way out. 

 

Juan Castillo, unsurprisingly, isn’t at his home office. Or his gym or his church. Hasn’t been seen in days, no hint of where he might be on any of his social media accounts, the cell phone registered to his name deactivated, a fireproof safe in his house without his passport or social security card. Money taken out of his bank account in a series of cash withdrawals, for long enough and in low enough amounts so as not to be flagged. 

He’s smart, the way that Sonny had expected. He tries to imagine what a dumb Barba relative might be like. Probably someone who got their law degree at Fordham night school, he thinks, a little derisively. 

No one from his family returns Sonny’s calls for information, and when Sonny goes back to the South Bronx looking for Estefania, her neighbor says that she’s not home, despite the fact that Sonny can see a light on under her door. 

“He’s in the wind,” Sonny says, when he calls Benson to let her know. “Not that surprising but still.”

“I’ll tell Barba,” Benson says, and Sonny can imagine how that conversation will go, Barba biting off a few curses and then pouring himself one hell of a drink. 

He doesn’t know what this’ll mean for Barba’s protective detail - if it means calling them off now that Castillo is gone or intensifying them, since he could slip back in the country to finish off the job under an assumed identity - and he says as much.

“Probably best to keep someone on him, at least for a while,” Benson says. 

“Yeah,” Sonny says. “He’ll probably disagree, though.” It feels - it feels like a fizzled ending to something that Sonny should have been able to solve, to fix. The familiar powerless itch of wanting to do something but not being able to. 

After Benson hangs up, he thinks about calling Bella, just to hear his niece gurgle at him over the phone. To get some flour and potatoes, and make enough gnocchi to last him months, just to keep his hands occupied. To go to the boxing gym down that street from his apartment and re-acquaint himself with the speed-bag. 

Instead, he goes to Hogan Plaza, nodding to the uniform who’s on protective detail and telling him to go back to his precinct. It feels inevitable, somehow, to be standing in Barba’s office, empty-handed, their main suspect gone and the question of if they should be exerting pressure on Barba’s aunt left unstated. They could bring her in, lean on her, give her enough time to call her son, wherever he is. A game of chicken, played across country lines, the hope that keeping his mother out of jail will be enough to draw him back to the US. 

“We’re not going to bring her in,” Barba says, before Sonny can even say hello. 

“All due respect,” Sonny says, “but you’re not going to be the charging ADA on this. Liv’s already contacted the DA for someone else to handle the case.” 

“All due fucking respect, Detective,” Barba says, “but it’s circumstantial evidence and the word of an old woman who’d rather spend her years in Rikers than see her only living son taken from her. No ADA in their right mind will even request a warrant for him.” 

“So that’s it then?” Sonny asks. “We just … let him get away with murder? Where’s the justice in that?”

“Where’s the justice in any of it?” Barba says. “One cousin dead, another gone, my aunt’ll probably be next. I hear from my mother she’s already considering moving to Florida.” 

“We’ve flagged Castillo’s passport,” Sonny says. “If he tries to come back -”

“Yes, because there’s _definitely_ no way to get to Miami from Cuba without the authorities noticing.”

“I’m trying here, Rafael,” Sonny says, pressing his nails into his palm. “We referred the case over to narcotics, who are seeing if they can trace whatever supplier your tailor was working with. I’ll let you know what we hear.” 

“Great,” Barba says, and there’s a sting to it. “Well, case closed.”

“Hey,” Sonny says. “Look, I’m sorry. This was shitty, how it turned out. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I imagine Tía Estefi feels somewhat differently, considering,” he says. “But she’s right, I didn’t want to soil my hands, and look where that got me.” 

“An ADA’s office,” Sonny says. “Though, you know, no one’ll think less of you if you - you don’t need to be ashamed of where you came from, is all I’m saying.” 

Barba levels a glare at him. “Detective, you don’t need me to explain why Rafael from the barrio doesn’t get to announce where he’s from at every turn but Dominick ‘Sonny’ Carisi, Jr., the pride of the Staten Island Carisis, does.”

“I don’t,” Sonny says. “It’s just - you’d be who you are regardless, is what I’m saying.”

“Not regardless, Carisi. _Because of_ , and you’re smart enough to know the difference.”

In any other circumstances, Sonny would make a joke - oh, Barba thinks he’s smart, now? 

But Barba’s needling him, deliberate, looking for a fight, and maybe that’s what he needs, not sympathy or Sonny to fix things. Something familiar. An argument, something to get his blood up, something where he can use words as his primary weapon, to decant some of the rage he has going before it boils over into something more.

Not that Sonny’s any more immune to that feeling, like if he doesn’t punch a hole into his mood, he’ll erupt. “I’m just saying that no one’s gonna think you didn’t earn a fucking Harvard degree if you wear like a pair of jeans or something. Do you even own a T-shirt? Or you just like to strut around, acting like you’re better than the rest of us because you can put on a fucking suit and -” 

Barba’s up, on him, in his face, close enough to smell and Sonny feels at once the same tenderness he did in the car the day before, and something stronger, the kind of anger that might have ended him in a fight when he was younger. In a million different bad decisions that he channels into a defiant look at Barba now, who’s looking at him like he might slug him or kiss him. 

“I like nice suits, because I like nice suits,” he hisses into Sonny’s ear. “Not because I’m trying to dress up like I’ve never lived in an apartment without a doorman. I like how they fit. How they feel. How I look when I’m wearing them. How other people look at me when I’m wearing them.” He pauses for effect, a trick Sonny’s seen him use against witnesses before completely undoing them, the way he feels undone now. 

“I like,” Barba says, “how you look at me when I’m wearing them.”

“Jesus,” Sonny says, and Barba kisses him then, hard enough that Sonny worries his lip will crack, mean and untender, a kiss like an argument that he’s already knows he’s won. “Jesus,” Sonny says, again, after, running his tongue over his lower lip to see if he’s bleeding. He isn’t; just feels like he should be, raw and exposed. “Rafael, I -”

“Do not condescend to apologize to me, Carisi,” Barba says. “I don’t think my pride can take it.” 

“I wasn’t,” Sonny lies. “I thought I was being subtle. You know, about the suit thing.”

“You thought you were being …” Barba pinches the bridge of his nose. “Detective, take this as a compliment - you’re not subtle.” He looks calmer, mouth a little swollen, the look in his eyes like he might try to fight the entire world abated, at least for now. 

“I don’t think a man wearing a bright red pocket square gets to call anyone else un-subtle, Counselor.”

“A fair point. Speaking of - I actually have an appointment tonight that I need to get going to.”

“New tailor?” Sonny asks. 

“We’ll see if he’s a -”

“If you say ‘a good fit,’ I’m going to revoke everything I ever said about you being, you know, erudite.”

Barba laughs at that, and he does look better, more like himself, like he fits back in his skin. They should talk about the kiss, though Sonny doesn’t know what to say other than an open request to do that again, behind a sturdier door than Barba’s office door and in a place where Sonny can free Barba from the confines his suit. 

“Technically,” Sonny says. “I’m still on your protective detail.”

“Are you asking if you can tag along?” Barba says, but he’s picking up his coat, looping his scarf around his neck. “Well, come on then.”

 

They go to a tailor whose shop looks almost indistinguishable from one where they’d found the bodies. Racks of suits and dress shirts, a rainbow of ties and pocket-squares, even trays of cufflinks in everything from ‘midtown banker’ to ‘midtown banker who wanted to hide a bump of cocaine in them.’ It’d be funny, if they hadn’t pulled two bodies out of Barba’s previous tailor’s shop, and so Sonny swallows it as a joke, and looks through a rack dangling with suspenders. 

“I’m going to -” and Barba heads to the back of the shop to strip down, get measured, discuss fabric options, color choices, wear patterns, the particular length of his inseam and how he feels about having a break in the legs of his suit. 

Whenever Sonny imagined this, he’d imagined mostly Barba stripped down to his shorts and undershirt, standing on a platform, being touched by a stranger who wasn’t Sonny. The tailor, an older man with a distinguished head of close-cropped white hair and a suit that sets off his dark skin, does nothing to earn Sonny giving him the stink-eye, but didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by it either. 

However, this was closer to when Sonny had accompanied Bella to buy a car - a discussion he was happy enough to come along to but, at the end of the day, kind of boring. He sits in a set of chairs that face away from the mirrored set-up at the back of the shop, scrolling through his phone, looking through email, and setting a reminder to grab something to bring to the squadroom the next day for breakfast. 

Rollins had made some comment about how he didn’t bring them food anymore, pouting, and Sonny couldn’t let his reputation be besmirched in that manner, especially not after Rollins had mouthed the word ‘besmirched’ back at him. 

“Ready?” he asks, when Barba appears in front of him, dressed, and holding a small bag that Sonny can see two bright ties rolled up in.

“Not quite,” Barba says. “Go get measured.”

It’s not a request, and Sonny would bristle at the order, if Barba didn’t seat himself facing the set of mirrors at the back of the shop like he was going to watch, which it turned out was exactly what he was going to do. 

Sonny swallows thickly, and couldn’t decide if facing toward or away from Barba would feel less like he’s being looked at, especially not with the weight of his gaze on Sonny feeling as heavy as wool. He compromises, turning to the side, and then looking everywhere but Barba’s face when the tailor asks for him to reposition himself as he’s being measured. 

He feels - embarrassed wasn’t the right word. _Observed_ , maybe. And Barba sits there like he wants Sonny to see the open spread of his legs, the open look of appreciation on his face as Sonny stands in his undershirt and suit pants, tailor jotting down notes that amount to the fact that Sonny is both skinny and tall. 

Sonny looks at the ceiling, at the polished gleam of the floors, at the inside of his own eyelids to avoid looking directly at him, the way he’d avoided looking at Rollins when they’d first started working together, the way he avoids looking at fucking sun on a hot day spent out on the water. 

Still, he feels sunburned, after, skin bright and cheeks warm, even after he’s returned to his suit, rumpled from climbing stairs in the South Bronx, from where Barba had gripped him in his office what seems like hours ago. 

“That was some dirty pool, Rafael,” he says, exiting the shop, an order in hand for alterations to be made to a navy suit that Barba had selected from the rack for him. 

Barba raises his eyebrows. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know exactly what I mean,” Sonny says. 

“Did you - was that a problem?” Barba asks, and for a second, he looks actually apprehensive, like he’d overstepped this thing brewing between them.

“Yeah,” Sonny says. “There was one too many people there, but I thought it’d be weird to tell him to leave his own shop.” 

 

Sonny picks up his suit three days later, and carefully hangs the garment bag in the back of the unassuming sedan that everyone in the city would immediately know is a police vehicle. He’d tried to pay, though the tailor waves off his credit card, saying that Barba had already taken care of it. He’d accepted a tip, though, insisting that Sonny try the suit when he got home in case further alterations needed to be made. 

He considers driving home, about putting on the suit in front of a mirror, maybe Facetiming one of his sisters to get her opinion once he’s dressed. Instead, he finds himself showing the suit bag to the security camera at Barba’s apartment building, so that Barba can see what has with him as he buzzes to be let in. 

He holds the suit up in the elevator, a little higher than shoulder height, careful not to crumple the bottom of it before he has a chance to show it to Barba. Before Barba has a chance to see him in it. 

Eighteen floors, and the elevator moves slowly enough that he can anticipate Barba’s eyes on him. Would he watch while Sonny got undressed? He imagines Barba sitting on his couch, on his bed, legs open, watching intently, and goes hot all over, especially when he pictures himself stepping between his spread legs and bending over to -

The elevator doors open, and Sonny considers fleeing, for a second, back out to his car. Driving home, splashing water over his face, possibly dunking his whole head in a sink to get rid of this feeling of being completely overwhelmed and also incredibly turned on. 

Barba answers his door wearing a pair of jeans and a goddamn T-shirt, and Sonny almost laughs. 

“I brought -” he says, holding the suit bag up.

“I can see that,” Barba says, stepping aside and taking the suit bag from Sonny as he strips off his coat and steps out of his shoes. 

“Where do you want to -” 

Barba surprises him, going to the fridge and pressing a beer into his hand, sitting down on the couch, asking him about the case he’d caught a day ago, something mercifully routine and depressing in how routine it is, a he-said, she-said case in which the biggest complicating factor was over a question of diplomatic immunity. 

They don’t talk about Castillo; they will, probably, in a few weeks time, or if there’s any development on the case, which there hasn’t been. It feels too fresh, and a waste of Barba’s good mood, freed from his protective detail, sitting on his couch drinking a brown ale from a bottle with a peeling label.

It feels _normal_ , a conversation that they’ve had before, except for the way that Barba sits with his body turned toward Sonny, the way he’d runs a finger over the condensation on his beer bottle and then swipes it over his lower lip to moisten it.

He even begins to talk about ordering dinner, when Sonny goes, “Do you want to see this thing or not?” and motions to the suit. 

“Yes,” Barba says, simply. “Let’s see it.”

Sonny takes off his work suit in Barba’s bedroom, jacket and socks first, unlooping his belt, unbuttoning his shirt, and finally peeling it off. He’s not wearing an undershirt, and he stands there for a minute, goosebumps pricking his skin, as Barba watches him. 

“I know, I’m an Italian mother’s nightmare,” he says, gesturing to his torso, the cut of his ribs. “Can’t keep any weight on.” 

Barba’s sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard, legs in front of him. “Not what I was thinking,” he says. 

Pants next, and Sonny reaches to pull them down before Barba leans over, catching his wrist. “Let me,” he says, and Sonny’s breath goes short. His hands sit heavy on Sonny’s hips, and he gently pushes at Sonny’s waistband. Unwinched by a belt, and his slacks slide down, Barba offering a hand as Sonny steps out of them. 

Sonny had picked out his underwear at six in the morning, half-awake, before his first cup of coffee and after a run had done little to knock the cobwebs out of his brain. Not awake enough to admit that he’d selected them knowing that he might end up like this, undressed in Barba’s apartment, feeling pale and naked and with Barba’s hand inches from his cock. 

Barba hums appreciatively, and then goes to the suit bag, zipper loud in the quiet of his bedroom, extracting the suit, jacket shoulders looking wide on the hanger, a dress shirt under it, a separate hanger containing pants, which Sonny steps into but doesn’t zip up. 

Barba removes the jacket, undoing the top button on the shirt that held it to the hanger before sliding it onto Sonny’s arms. He leans in to do up the buttons, breathing close and hot on Sonny’s neck, looking up at him questioningly. “You’ve been with a man before?” he asks, and he hooks a finger between the buttons of Sonny’s shirt placket, tugging Sonny closer.

“Sure,” Sonny says. “Bought suits before too. But none - nothing like this.”

Barba kisses him then, on the throat, before he buttons his collar. On the interior of each wrist before sealing each shirt sleeve with a cufflink. He sinks to his knees, and Sonny shakes through an inhale, another when he feels Barba’s lips, low, on his stomach where his shirt tails separate, breathing against his bare skin. 

He does up the last button, eases Sonny’s shirt into his pants with gentle hands and Sonny feels somehow more naked than when he started, a striptease in reverse, especially when Barba circles a belt around his waist and buckles it, like he’s being enclosed in armor, stomach and wrists and neck still warm with where Barba pressed his mouth. 

“These pants are too expensive to ruin, Rafael,” Sonny says, and his voice sounds hoarse, his breathing loud in his ears. He can feel his pulse in his neck, against his cuffs, staccato, and there’s no way he can go out into the world, outside the confines of Barba’s apartment, no way he can walk through Manhattan feeling like this, like he’s has Barba’s name stitched into his skin. 

Barba sits back, considering the press of Sonny’s cock in his pants. From this angle, Sonny can see the individual threads of his eyelashes, the curve of his lips. “Then don’t ruin them,” he says, and brings a hand up to where Sonny’s hard in his pants, both a tease through layers of fabric and a slight release to the pressure, drawing a groan from Sonny. 

“Uh,” Sonny says. “Keep doing that and I absolutely will.”

“I wish you could see yourself,” Barba says, not stilling his hand. “Here,” and he rises to shut the bedroom door, turns Sonny to face the full-length mirror hung there. 

In it, Sonny looks flushed, desperate, hair coming free from product, color in his cheeks and ears. He’s breathing hard, shirt rising and falling with his chest, tie feeling like it’s both strangling him and holding him together. 

“Jesus,” he says, and Barba takes that as a cue to lean forward, stuffing a pillow that’s fallen off the bed under his knees, face against Sonny’s zipper. He can feel the heat of Barba’s breath. “I’m gonna -” he begins.

“No, you won’t,” Barba says. “Not until I tell you to.” And he goes to undo Sonny’s belt again, slowly inching down the insane press of his zipper, reaching into his pants and extracting his cock, wet at the tip and getting slicker when Barba rubs it with his thumb and forefinger, moving his foreskin. 

“I might,” Sonny says, gasping, and he’s rewarded by the hard circle of Barba’s hand gripping him, the wet press of his mouth to his low belly. 

“You won’t,” Barba repeats, and he licks Sonny, once, just with the edge of his tongue, and Sonny’s hands are shaking, his knees, his entire body, especially when Barba does it again, punctuating each lick with a hard squeeze, the kind that’d normally would be too tight but now just has Sonny asking for more. 

It’s overwhelming, the sensation of it, Barba’s hand against his cock, then behind his balls, pressing up with a surety that Sonny had previously ascribed to him in court, and he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to watch Barba in the heat of a cross-examination without getting hard in his pants. Maybe that was Barba’s goal all along. 

He’s not going to last, not like this, Barba on his knees in front of him, the clothes Barba bought and paid for surrounding him. “Can I -” he begins. 

“You may,” Barba says, angling his face up and closing his eyes. And it takes Sonny a second to process what Barba’s asking for, asking for Sonny to do _that_ , to mark him the way that Sonny feels marked, to affirm that he’s Sonny’s the way that Sonny feels indelibly his. 

“Fuck,” Sonny says, and that’s it, he’s gone, pushed over the edge and gasping, brain a pop of lights, at once feeling completely removed from and completely within his own body. 

He comes back to himself and Barba has helped him out off his pants, his suit jacket, has unbuttoned his shirt and hung it on the back of his desk chair. Has encouraged Sonny into his bed, between his sheets that smell spectacularly of him, and has gone and washed his face. His eyelashes are clinging together. 

The clock on the wall reads almost ten o’clock, and it occurs to Sonny that he may have passed out for while. 

“Uh,” Sonny says. “Sorry.”

“You’re apologizing?” Barba says. He’s lost his shirt somewhere in the process, probably because Sonny _came all over it_ , and Sonny flushes with the thought of it. He’s built like a lawyer, like someone who’s chosen to work with his mind rather than his hands, and Sonny leans over and buries his face against his warm, slightly furred chest. 

“I didn’t … you know,” he says, mostly to Barba’s neck and armpit. “Get you off.”

“I took care of it,” Barba says, but he doesn’t sound resentful. “Right after you -” and he reaches over, grabbing his phone from the nightstand, pressing his thumb against the button to unlock it and then showing Sonny a picture of - “Probably ill-advised, but what in the past few days hasn’t been?” 

A picture, taken in Barba’s bathroom mirror, Barba with a hand on himself, and it’s wet, glistening with - it takes Sonny a slow few seconds to process it. Barba using _that_ to get himself off, Barba having the presence of mind to take a fucking _picture_ of it, Barba looking at him now, nervous, like Sonny isn’t going to sear this image into his memory for the rest of his life, isn’t reaching for his own dick now to give it a quick jerk because he can’t not.

“You should probably delete it,” he says, but when Barba moves his thumb over the little trash-can icon, Sonny stays his hand. “I mean, tomorrow. You should probably delete it tomorrow.” 

“I’ll be sure to take that under advisement,” Barba says, lawyerly. 

Sonny can’t help but laugh. “Thank you for the suit,” he says, a moment later. 

Barba smirks. “It looks good on you.”

“Looks good on your floor too,” Sonny says, and lets himself be kissed, lets himself wear the warm outline of Barba’s mouth on his chest and shoulders, the scrape of his teeth that he’ll feel the next day, under his clothes.


End file.
